Eric Norlin is a conference master organizer. The original conference we helped Eric create – Defrag – is happening for the fourth time in ten days in Boulder (11/17-11/18). I know of several major announcements that are happening around the conference along with a long list of amazing people that are attending that I’ll get to hang out with for two days.

In the run up to Defrag, something awesome happened last week as Eric continues to work on the two other conferences he runs – Glue and Blur. ﻿Alcatel-Lucent signed on to be the Community Underwriter and Partner Sponsor of Gluecon 2011.

Glue is aimed aimed at developers, The topics are far technical and because Glue isn’t defined as “a cloud computing” conference, it’s not caught in the echo chamber of “defining” this, that and the other thing. Glue seeks to explore the connective “tissue” of the web and IT infrastructure. That connective tissue can be called a lot of things: service oriented architecture, web services, APIs, cloud computing, etc. But call it what you will, developers know that it’s not the name that counts, it’s the building of the application, and the underlying infrastructure that supports it.

His goal is simple: make Glue the gathering place for developers in the API/Cloud space. Alcatel-Lucent has agreed to underwrite 15 companies to have free demo space at Gluecon (i.e., the demo pod includes passes to the show, signage, internet — everything you need; just show up with a laptop).

The companies will be selected by merit by the following group of people.

Eric Norlin

Chris Shipley (Guidewire Group)

Mathew Ingram (of MESH and GigaOm)

John Musser (Programmable Web)

Laura Merling (Alcatel-Lucent)

Alex Williams (ReadWriteWeb)

Jeff Lawson (Twilio)

Jeff Hammond (Forrester)

Ian Glazer (Gartner)

Ben Kepes (Diversity.net)

Vinod Kurpad (Best Buy)

Seth Levine (Foundry Group)

The process will be simple: Eric will accept applications for the 15 spots, every person on the selection committee gets one vote, and the top 15 vote getters have a demo pod.

Eric is trying to change the game with this one. If you take away the company specific conferences (Google i/o, Twitter, F8), there really just aren’t that many national-level gathering spots for developers in the cloud/API space. The key word here is “developers.”